"AMD has to get several things right about the products it's launching today, because the competitiveness of the entire HD 7000 series hangs on its success. First, it needs to create a sizable performance jump, over the previous-generation Radeon HD 6800 series; second, its new chip has to prove Graphics CoreNext as being a viable investment for AMD by meeting some basic cost/performance, performance/die-area, and performance/Watt figures."

"The two are based on AMD's brand new GPU, codenamed "Pitcairn". Built on the 28 nm fabrication process, this new chip holds 2.8 billion transistors. "Pitcairn" is a 100% upscale of the "Cape Verde" silicon, on which the Radeon HD 7700 series is based. It has 1280 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, arranged in 20 Graphics CoreNext Compute Units (GCN CUs)."

"We have to discuss power consumption, as I'm riddled how AMD pulls that off. If we stay focused on the R7870 for a minute you'll agree with me that it's in the same performance level as a GTX 580 right?
Well, the R7870 used roughly a 100 Watts LESS then that GTX 580. When we reverse calculate and measure the power consumption the R7870 uses roughly 130 Watt where the GTX 580 hovers at a 235~240W, and that's measured in game while it's peaking and stressed. So for the R7850... well we measure roughly 106 Watt. Amazing stuff really."

If Kepler performs as well as the previews would have us believe, they probably won't be able to give away the rest of their 5xx series cards. I anticipate another major price slash after the 6xx cards are released.

I would advocate caution until the silicon hits the tarmac.
...
NVidia have, we think, withdrawn from collaboration with SETI now that their initial publicity objectives have been achieved. So we may be in for interesting times, again. I'll be trying to keep an eye on how it develops.

Nvidia I see is going to make installing or removing the pci-e power cables like on the 1st revision GTX295, hard to install or remove as the cables will be facing each other, instead of like on the GTX590...Pluto is still a planetBeep! Beep!

There is also a new Precision tool from EVGA called EVGA Precision X that's geared specifically toward the 680 (ver 3.0.1), but is backward compatible thru the 200 series. This will be the new look of tool as there will no be further upgrades to the legacy version of the tool.